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February 2, 2007
The Cisco Technobiz Mastermind Quiz 2007 is on and the semi
finals were held on 30th January at Cisco offices in Bangalore,
Mumbai and Delhi. In the west, the winners were Bharath Shetty and Tushar
Kulkarni of Wipro Infotech. Anurag Khare and Sanjith Aiyappa of Network
Solutions won the southern round, while Manish Kanijo and Amit Bansal of
Datacraft India made it to the finals from north.
This time around, the company threw the contest open online and
two employees from their channel partners organizations had to form a team and
participate online. Whittling down the winners, Cisco selected three teams in
north, south and west to fight for the final rounds.
In the south, the contestants were from Wipro Infotech, Network
Solutions and Darts IT Networks. The three teams in the western region were from
Tata Consultancy Services, Datacraft and Wipro Infotech. Surprisingly in north,
one team was from Datacraft, while the other two teams were from the same
company – Darts IT Network.
It is noticeable that only the teams from the leading solution
provider companies made it to the semi-finals. And Anurag Khare of Netsol, who
won the south rounds, feels this is a good trend, since the quiz is aimed at
appreciating those who are involved in technology selling and not in mere
product pushing. He said, “This quiz is about the technology and it should not
be diluted by making it more generic in nature, just to include the smaller
players in the market.”
This time around, Cisco had also done away with the more general
knowledge question and answer session and had instead included a project study.
Here the contestants had to present the ideal Cisco products for a hypothetical
customer, given some parameters and the client's set of requirements.
But Kulkarni from Wipro Infotech does not agree with him. He
felt that the online mode of having the quiz was very impersonal. Also, some of
this peers lost out of the semi-finals as the Internet connection would snap
just after they had submitted their entries online.
Earlier, Cisco would hold the quiz at a hotel in the city and
participants could register themselves and fight it out there in a written
format. And different teams of people from the same company would enthuse for
their colleagues who made it to the qualifying rounds. “Without the
encouragement from your colleagues, this event becomes too clinical,” Kulkarni
noted. He was the regional runner-up in 2005 and in 2006 he reached the venue
late, thus missing the entire contest.
Now, that they have been selected for the finals, the team
members are working hard to clinch the final rounds. Khare and his teammate
Aiyappa are going to prepare for the finals by focusing on the advanced
technologies in the networking domain. Kulkarni and Shetty have downloaded some
general knowledge questions and are brushing up their knowledge about current
affairs.
Now the regional winners will clash at the final, which is being held at the Jaypee Palace in Agra on February 10. Page(s) 1
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